What's in my bag

Listening to: M.Ward’s Post-War album.

Here is an homage to my chambray shirt (thanks S!) that I wear all the time these days. I like how versatile it is, because I can wear it with a work skirt, with black jeans, shorts, or with a dress. This shirt and grey and rust/gold nail polish are my favorite thing to wear these days.

I just noticed this morning how much of a weird toiletry-carrying-grandma I’ve become. That or an extremely prepared hypochondriac. The tragedy of it all is that I don’t even like carrying big purses, I’m constantly wishing aloud to some barely listening store clerk about how I wish they would just come up with the technology to combine all my cards, keys, and money together in one thing that I could keep in my pocket. But as a lady, I sometimes wear things that don’t have pockets, so maybe it could be that all the necessary information is embedded into a nail polish that you could put on your big thumb’s nail and have it scan everything? But not an embedded chip, because you’d want the option of taking it off.

Anyways, currently, in my large bag, I am carrying the following pharmaceutical (?) items:

• Essence of Beauty Sunblossom Antibacterial Hand Sanitizer
• Eucerin Intensive Repair Hand Crème
• Interdental Brush & Toothpick
• Antiseptic Mouth Rinse
• Xtreme Clean Dental Floss
• Visine Advanced Relief Eye Drops
• Rosebud Strawberry Lip Balm
• Ibuprofuen
  

This all of a sudden seems bizarre to me, someone who usually considers herself to be pretty low maintenance, but I guess I err on the side of preparedness and hygiene more and more as I get older. Also, it mostly has to do with the fact that working in an office 8 hours a day requires you to be prepared. Plus, the weather be getting colder, you feel? Which is why the hand lotion is extremely important. My usual go-to hand lotion is Kiehl’s but since I’d have to order that in, and I need a stand-in until I do, I decided to give the so-called new and improved Eucerin a try.

Other things I have in my purse right now:

• small make-up bag
• earphones
• iPod charger
• wallet
• unpaid parking ticket
• pens
• peppermints
• whipped honey
  

To explain the honey, I got some amazing honey- both whipped and raw – from the Farmer’s Market and I love it. It is soo good. I put it in my tea, coffee, eat it with vegetables, and sometimes put it in my butternut squash. Also, as an aside, honey is good for face masks/scrubs (Try it: crush non-coated aspirin with some water and mix into honey. It works! I think I did a post about it somewhere), and good for extremely chapped lips.

Lastly, in my figurative bag (yeah, I’ll go there), I have:

• three short stories that I really love right now (Cowboy, by Thomas McGuane; Concerning the Bodyguard, by Daniel Barthelme; and In the Reign of Harad IV, by Steven Millhauser),
• songs by M.Ward and Breathe Owl Breathe,
• Romans (the book of the Bible),
• an idea for a painting, an idea for a pastel/font,
• a to-do project to make a chalkboard in a frame.
  

There you have it. Oh! And I should also mention, I also have a paper clip in my wallet, but no band-aid. My dad used to tell my sisters and I that we should always carry around a paperclip and band-aid, in case of emergencies. Somehow this makes him the best dad, ever.



What are you carrying around in your bag these days?